Prof. Elam Gross, who headed the research group for the search for the Higgs in the Atlas Besarn experiment: all the researchers who worked hard at CERN also deserve part of the prize, it's a shame that they don't do in physics what they do in the Nobel Peace Prize - give a prize to the organization.
The Nobel Prize Committee chose Prof. Peter Higgs and Prof. Francois Engler as winners of the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics, for the discovery of the particle that gives the other particles their mass, as proven in the experiments conducted by thousands of scientists at two experimental centers in Sarn: Atlas and CMS.
The announcement of the win was delayed and the press conference at the Swedish Academy of Sciences took place an hour later than planned.
It should be noted that while Prof. Engler agreed to talk on the phone and answer the journalists' questions, Prof. Higgs 'went underground'.
Later today we will provide a detailed scientific review of the discovery.
Prof. Elam Gross from the Weizmann Institute, who served as the director of the search for the Higgs particle as part of the Atlas Besarn experiment at the time of the discovery, says in a conversation with the science website from an Atlas conference in Morocco about the winning of Peter Higgs and Francois Engler: "There is no doubt that Higgs and Engler deserve the Nobel Prize in my eyes. If they are the first among equals it is very difficult to decide and I have no doubt that it was difficult for the Nobel Prize Committee to decide Engler and Braud deserve the prize and Lulia Braud would have passed away, but it would have been more appropriate to give a part of the award to Geoffrey Goldstone, who deserved the prize in 2008, but then one of the partners in the Nambu-Goldstone prediction, Yoichiro Nambu. "
In 1964 the theoretical physicists Francois Englert and Robert Braut of the Free University of Brussels and Peter Higgs of the University of Edinburgh reached the same conclusion from two different aspects. "Higgs was the first to clearly outline the existence of the particle that last year, we found it in two different experiments at the LHC particle accelerator in Sarn," says Prof. Gross, who was the director of the Higgs search program for one of them - Atlas, in which approximately 3,000 physicists work. "There is also no doubt that Engler and the late Braud deserve the prize for clearly delineating the mechanism for spontaneous symmetry breaking, which is the mechanism that gives mass to elementary particles."
"These things were already known from the 5s, but the understanding of the nature of the elementary particles only came in the 7s. And there is no doubt that the first ones who deserved it were among the group of XNUMX-XNUMX people, and you can add to them Gernik, Hagen, Kippel and Goldstone, who ran an almost close race. Gernik Hagen and Keppel published a paper only one month late after Higgs."
What is your share, the experimenters in Persia?
Prof. Gross: "The Nobel Prize is also not given to theoretical scientists unless there is experimental confirmation of the theory. It is clear that without the experimental work of nearly 6,000 experimenters in Atlas and CMS, Higgs and Engler would not have won. It is clear to me that both the experiments of Atlas and CMS We deserve the Nobel Prize because the particle would not have been discovered otherwise it required effort and original thinking. We discovered the particle against all expectations In this short time and with the number of collisions and with the means at our disposal, we would have succeeded. Without the dedication and commitment of all the physicists who searched for the Higgs from the two partnerships - Atlas and CMS, we might have had to wait a few more years until we discovered the Higgs A mass that was accessible to us GeV 125 and also because many original techniques were developed to find that needle in the haystack. We developed innovative techniques, upgraded the entire statistical method, and the physicists who performed the experiments were truly great heroes. The two experiments are the great heroes of this story."
But you can't give a Nobel Prize to 6,000 people?
"You can't give a Nobel Prize to 6,000 people, but you can give it to their organization." says Prof. Gross. "The rules of the Nobel Prize do not forbid this. Although it is not customary in physics, it is a common phenomenon in the Nobel Peace Prize. What is more, it is not customary to give a Nobel Prize to experience and theory at the same time. Usually, experience comes after theory and I would not be surprised if this is what happened. Me too I think there is room to challenge the Nobel Prize committee again on the subject of awarding the Nobel Prize to great experiments in biology or projects like the blue brain) are going to get a Nobel Prize when they discover dark matter. The Nobel Prize Committee will have to learn to deal with this world of Big Science."
What does the fact that it took 40 years and especially a huge accelerator to confirm the existence of the Higgs mean? Is the old science of small laboratories over?
Prof. Gross: "The old world of laboratories has not ended and will never end. There will always be a place for science done in a small laboratory, but in the field of elementary particles, small science has become somewhat bankrupt from this for several reasons - first of all, the instruments, accelerators or detectors cost a fortune Money - from millions to billions of dollars and to finance it, there is nothing to do. Second, every country sends its physicists and it adds up. Third, it takes a lot of brains to analyze the data. The question of where the small science ends and the big science begins is subjective. Is 30 people looking for a small or big science? Today, 300 people do In my opinion, 3,000 or 30 people is the same. The time when Thompson discovered the electron with the help of a tube that costs 3,000 dollars is over Both university governments and prize committees have to deal with so-called big science.
Did the discovery of the Higgs help divert additional budgets to the field of particle physics?
Prof. Gross: "We believed that the discovery of the Higgs would bring more awareness and money and funding to the field of elementary particles or high energies. And to our surprise, the world created an atmosphere of 'have you found what you want? What is left to do? You have closed the corner' and this is very distorted because precisely now beyond what we need to learn And to better understand what we found there is every reason to continue searching in new areas because it only shows that our thinking was correct and we understood the tip of the iceberg correctly but we did not uncover the entire iceberg. We must understand that it is possible Invest a lot of money to find out all the details and not cut back. Give us funding to look for super symmetry and understand better how we arrived at one equation and not something that is made up of many equations. Give us funding to understand the theory of everything, how the universe was created. We are not there yet. The LHC is expected to be active for another 10-20 years and there is a non-zero chance that we will discover new particles, but we are already talking about the fact that no accelerator will be built. higher. There are many questions about what may be beyond the standard model because it is not perfect and there are many open questions in it. Israeli scientists are also investigating possible new physics beyond the standard model such as Prof. Erez Etzion from Tel Aviv University, Prof. Shlomit Terem and Prof. Yoram Rosen from the Technion from the Technion, Prof. Giora Mickenberg, Ehud Duchovani from the Weizmann Institute, deal with what is happening beyond the model the standard."
The winners of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry will be announced tomorrow. See: Will the winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2001 win again this year?
